The Friends of Charles Darwin

The way children learn may determine the building blocks of language, suggests a study of deaf Nicaraguan children. Ann Senghas of New York's Columbia University, US, and colleagues studied three generations of deaf schoolchildren from the Nicaraguan capital, Managua… They found that older students used hand signals resembling the gestures employed by hearing people, mimicking the entire event physically. But younger pupils - who had interacted with other deaf children from an early age - used a more complex series of signs. They split the scene into component parts and arranged these sequentially to convey the incident.